No vision board, no grand plan, no dreams of greatness.
The only thing comedian Sebastian Maniscalco really knew when he came to Los Angeles from the suburbs of Illinois 26 years ago was that he wanted to make people laugh and hopefully make some money doing it, at least enough to live on and keep his Italian family off his back about the dubious career choice of pursuing stand-up comedy. Waiting tables at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills was his main prospect after showing up to L.A. in March 1998, along with getting stand-up gigs whenever and wherever he could.
Since then a lot has changed. As he strides through the underground labyrinth in the hull of the $2-billion, spacecraft-looking Intuit Dome — wearing snug black jeans; a heavily starched, leopard-print jacket; and perfectly coiffed silver hair — you’d think he owns the place. OK, so he doesn’t quite have Steve Ballmer money just yet, but when it comes to Inglewood’s newest arena, he most certainly owns a piece of its history as the first comedian ever to perform at the arena on Aug. 17.
“If you would have told young me, ‘Hey, in 2024, just so you know, you’re going to be performing where the Clippers play basketball in an arena,’ I couldn’t comprehend it,” he said, sitting back on a white leather couch in a dressing room. “Back then that felt like something, fame was never in the cards for me.”
A man without too many lofty aspirations, he attributes his continued success, almost three decades in, to ignoring the glitz and staying focused on the grit of getting through life.
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“Am I surprised that I’m doing this? I mean, I don’t know. I just feel like I’ve worked so hard at what I do, and people seem to enjoy it. The fact that, you know, they want to come see me in an arena like this is flattering,” he said. “Quite honestly, I don’t know if it’s even really kind of hit me yet. Anytime I do anything, I just think, Where am I working tonight? I’m working at the Comedy Store tonight, and I’m working at the Intuit Dome Aug.17. I just feel like it’s just, you know, going to work.”
“If you would have told young me, ‘Hey, in 2024, just so you know, you’re going to be performing where the Clippers play basketball in an arena,’ I couldn’t comprehend it,” Maniscalco said.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Whether you count his six comedy specials, time on the big screen with Robert De Niro in Maniscalco’s semi-autobiographical comedy “About My Father,” starring in the HBO/Max series “Bookie” or being among the highest-grossing touring comedians in the country (he sold out Madison Square Garden a record-breaking five times in a row this year), there are few boxes denoting a successful career that Maniscalco hasn’t checked off.
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On a recent afternoon inside one of the many dressing rooms inside Intuit Dome, Maniscalco’s calm and cool demeanor as he poses for photos is substantially subdued compared with his onstage persona of an eternally vexed Italian dad with cartoonish expressions and full-body comedic convulsions. Yes, in most respects he is very much the guy people see in his specials, but a less bullish, more thoughtful version when he’s not cracking jokes. As much of a character as he might be when calling out the embarrassing behavior of modern society, he knows his super power is relating to people and getting them to forget about their problems while he’s performing.
“I just want people to say that I never disappointed them at a show. That’s kind of what’s most important to me,” he said. “You come to my show and for an hour and a half, you’re going to forget that your mother’s dying, you’re going to forget that you were just told that you have high blood pressure. My goal is when you come here and watch comedy and forget about all those things … it’s like medicine.”
Days after his 51st birthday last month, Maniscalco kicked off his national “It Ain’t Right” tour with a new set he says is about catching his fans up with his life as an older father of two young kids (a 5-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter) and the pitfalls and parallels of life as a professional funnyman as well as a dad. It’s the type of comedy he barely has time to rehearse because he’s too busy living it. But while some comics thrive on the mundane life events of shopping for groceries or going to the mall or picking the kids up from soccer practice, Maniscalco’s career no longer gives him much time to live those things. Instead, it’s more about the things he misses while on the road.
“I went to a water slide party yesterday with my kids and my wife, and I realized how I’m not part of the dad crew because I’m out of town a lot,” he said. “Meanwhile, they’ve been hanging out for three years. I felt like it was my first day at high school trying to find a friend.”
Life for Maniscalco is a constant balancing act between trying to be a good father and husband and also pushing his career in Hollywood forward.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
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Family has always been central to his comedy and inescapable when you consider his Italian roots. The bulk of Maniscalco’s most recognizable bits revolve around stories about his hairdresser father, Salvo, whose no-nonsense immigrant wisdom is exported from the old country. The bond he has with his father, which inspired his film “About My Father,” co-starring De Niro as his dad, inspires his role in the lives of his own kids, even as a celebrity who didn’t start having kids with his wife, multimedia artist Lana Gomez, until he was 43.
“Looking back, everything happens for a reason the way it should,” Maniscalco said. “But yeah, I wish I would have started [having kids] a little earlier, just because, you know, you start looking at your life, going, OK, my kid’s 5, I’m 50 — I’m almost double the difference between my father and I. And you start to think, am I going to be around for this kid when he gets married at 35. He might be changing my diaper on his wedding day.”
Life for Maniscalco is a constant balancing act between trying to be a good father and husband and also pushing his career in Hollywood forward. The two goals are often at odds, as any famous parent can attest, especially as Maniscalco continues venturing into Hollywood to earn his stripes as an actor, even if it means being open to a little danger.
The comedian recently signed on to do a ride-along with the Los Angeles Police Department in downtown L.A. in preparation for an upcoming role.
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“Right away I have an opinion on that,” he said. “My luck is I’m going to be on the ride-along and s— is going to go down and they’re going to go, ‘We need help, get out of car,’” he says, laughing. “So already I’m setting myself up for [stand-up material] that kind of feeds into that. This is my luck, and this will happen. … I bring this type of energy or luck to the situation.”
Even in more glamorous surroundings, Maniscalco can’t help but be the guy everything always happens to. On the new tour, he’s working out a joke about a hellish experience at last year’s Oscars, falling down what he said felt like 33 flights of stairs while wearing his tuxedo.
Though the perils of star-studded award shows might not resonate with his blue-collar fan base, Maniscalco finds a way to take himself down to bring other people’s spirits up as the hapless character at the center of a (slightly judgy) everyman story. The hope is to keep finding ways to improve even while at the top of his game. Whether it’s the love of success or just the fear of failure that motivates greatness (Maniscalco says it’s mostly the latter), there is no better testing ground to prove one’s mettle than on stage alone in front of a crowd.
“Everybody’s trying to do it at different levels, and when you get down to the core of it all, I think you have to embrace that fear,” he said. “Because as a comedian, you’re up there spilling your soul to these strangers. I think it’s part of what makes the connection between you and the fans grow deeper. That’s kind of the beauty of going up there.”
The arrival of his arena-status level of touring has brought with it the need to deliver on more than just jokes. For Maniscalco, that means putting on a show from the moment he touches the stage. “I’m a huge fan of showmanship back in the ’80s — Prince, Mötley Crüe, Michael Jackson — these are all music acts, but there’s an element of production and excitement, and I just want to kind of re-create some of that by doing some things that might not be traditional in the world of comedy,” he said.
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Before the Intuit Dome show, he said, he and his team have been working on ways to bring a unique comedy performance to the 18,000-seater that sits in a constellation of major venues including the Kia Forum, SoFi Stadium and the YouTube Theater. In an era when the arena-fication of comedy is common, finding ways to make a stand-up show stand out is another part of the craft for the comics at the top of the game. “I even need to figure out things like how do I get from the back of the house to the stage? How do I make an entrance? Then of course I have to be funny, or else no one in the arena gives a crap how I got there.”
“I just want people to say that I never disappointed them at a show. That’s kind of what’s most important to me,” Maniscalco said.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Despite all the ways comics can blow up on social media, Maniscalco says he still puts most of his energy on his live show, which he says is a better use of his time at this stage than worrying about boosting his profile on TikTok or Instagram. As with most other things that have to do with his comedy, the best strategy is not to try too hard to figure out what people want and give them what you think is good — often the comic gets pleasantly surprised at the response.
One recent video he posted after pointing out Scott Stapp, the lead singer of Creed, who came to one of his shows, and telling the singer about how “With Arms Wide Open” made him cry on his way home from Vegas went viral, garnering over 12 million views.
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“I just put it up as like a fun stupid video not thinking it was going nuts,” he said. “Rather than trying to figure out how do I get in the algorithm or what do kids want to see? What’s the younger generation looking for? I just do what I do, and if you like it, great. If not, that’s fine too…If you just do what you think is funny, I think people will relate.”
The tenets of comfort-food comedy continue to serve Maniscalco’s career like a hearty bowl of pasta — though he says most days he prefers a good steak. Right now his main comfort with life on the road has been taking his entire family with him on tour for the first time. With his wife and kids in tow, despite all the jokes about what’s wrong with the world, things still feel as right as they’ve ever been.
“This tour kind of has a little bit more meaning to me in the sense that for the first time in my life, I’m sharing what I do with my my entire family, particularly my kids, because now they kind of are aware of what Daddy does for a living, he makes people laugh,” he said, with a prideful grin. “I don’t know if I’m going to be doing Intuit Dome in two years. … I could be back at a theater or a comedy club, who knows. So to enjoy this tour with my family is really important to me.”
A still from ‘Late Shift’
| Photo Credit: Zodiac Pictures Ltd
A camera glides down a hospital corridor while a nurse moves fast enough that the fluorescent lights seem to blur behind her. Someone is waiting for test results that will probably change their life. Someone else wants tea. A trainee is panicking. Some infernal machine is beeping relentlessly somewhere out of sight. Drop into these opening minutes cold, and you might reasonably assume Dr Robbie or some equally sleep-deprived resident of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre is about to round the corner with a sarcastic aside and a chart that’s already overdue. Still, the resemblance lasts just long enough to be amusing before Petra Volpe’s Late Shift makes its intentions clear. This is certainly not a Swiss spinoff of The Pitt, but Volpe uses the grammar of that genre as a starting point and strips away its episodic escalation in favour of a slow, exhausting accumulation of routine tasks that gradually expose how fragile the entire system actually is.
The filmmaker’s earlier feature, The Divine Order, explored Swiss social change through a buoyant historical comedy, but she now moves in the opposite direction here, with a story that transpires almost entirely over one punishing evening in a Zurich surgical ward. The screenplay draws inspiration from German nurse Madeline Calvelage’s nonfiction account of hospital life, and the premise could not be simpler: a nurse arrives for the late shift and discovers that the ward is operating with barely enough staff to function.
Storyline: A dedicated nurse, tirelessly serves in an understaffed hospital ward. However, one day her shift becomes a tense and urgent race against the clock
Switzerland later selected the film as its submission for the International Feature category at the 98th Academy Awards, which places Leonie Benesch at the centre of a career stretch defined by characters who keep their composure while institutions around them wobble. Benesch became widely recognised through Germany’s 2023 Oscar submission The Teachers’ Lounge, where she played a teacher navigating a spiralling school scandal, then stepped into the broadcast room chaos of the Munich Olympics drama September 5, and earlier appeared in The Crown. Now, with Late Shift, Benesch turns those instincts into something close to a workplace pressure cooker.
The film unfolds through a chain reaction of ordinary tasks that gradually become overwhelming. Twenty-six patients require attention, and the ward operates with two nurses and a trainee who still hesitates before every decision. One elderly man waits for a cancer diagnosis that a doctor has no time to deliver. A dying woman’s sons hover in the corridor, demanding updates. A young mother with cancer wonders whether treatment still holds meaning. A businessman in a private room calculates his hospital fees in the currency of prompt service and grows irritated when his tea arrives late. Benesch’s Floria moves from room to room, absorbing each request while supervising the nervous student nurse, Amelie. The script rarely pauses to reflect on emotions because the pressure and stress of the work are relentless. So a lullaby sung to calm a confused woman with dementia delays the next task, and a brief conversation about dog photographs offers a lonely patient a moment of human attention — each small act of kindness costs a few minutes, and those minutes accumulate until the ward begins to outrun the people trying to hold it together.
A still from ‘Late Shift’
| Photo Credit:
Zodiac Pictures Ltd
Volpe stages this environment with a controlled minimalism. Judith Kaufmann’s camera trails Benesch through the corridors with persistence while Hansjörg Weissbrich’s editing maintains the sense that several crises are unfolding at once. Benesch carries the film through physical detail and eschews any semblance of theatricality. Her stride across the ward is purposeful and mechanical, her hands repeat the rituals of sanitiser, syringes and charts, and her voice remains calm even as the shift pushes her toward exhaustion. The film’s social texture emerges through those interactions. Nurses perform the constant maintenance that keeps the hospital running while doctors rarely appear, if at all. Class surfaces most clearly in the private patient who treats his room like a hotel suite and believes the price of said hotel suite should rearrange the priorities of the entire ward, which is a small but telling reminder that illness does not flatten social hierarchy.
Volpe closes the film with a reminder that hospitals across the world face a growing shortage of nurses. The point is unsubtle, though the film has already made a finer argument. Everyone understands that healthcare systems rely on workers who absorb impossible workloads, but the scale of that dependence rarely becomes visible until something breaks. The work continues because someone still needs care, and the system continues because people like Floria keep showing up, day after day. If anything, Late Shift spends ninety minutes observing how alarmingly thin the margin is between a functioning ward and institutional collapse.
Late Shift premieres at the Red Lorry Film Festival that will be held from 13 to 15 March 2026 in Mumbai
NEW YORK — What makes life worth living? For hard-core “Harry Potter” fans with money to burn, it might be getting Broadway tickets to interact fleetingly with Daniel Radcliffe in “Every Brilliant Thing,” an ingenious and touching solo performance piece written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe on the subject of suicide — or more precisely, on the ordinary joys that militate against such a drastic step.
Radcliffe was breathlessly scampering up and down the aisles of the Hudson Theatre before the show began, enlisting audience members to be participants in the play. Having seen “Every Brilliant Thing” twice before, once at the Edye (the black box at Santa Monica’s BroadStage) starring Donahoe in 2017 and once at the Geffen Playhouse’s intimate Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater starring Daniel K. Isaac in 2023, I knew exactly what he was up to.
The play revolves around a list that the narrator began at the tender age of 7 after his mother first attempted suicide. While she was still in the hospital, he started compiling, as much for her benefit as for his own, sources of everyday happiness.
Ice cream, water fights, kind people who aren’t weird and don’t smell unusual. These items are given a number, and audience members assigned a particular “brilliant thing” are expected to shout out their entry when their number is called.
The list gradually grows in complexity as the narrator gets older. Miss Piggy, spaghetti bolognese and wearing a cape give way to more sophisticated pleasures, such as the way Ray Charles sings the word “You” in the song “Drown in My Own Tears” or the satisfaction in writing about yourself in the second person.
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Music plays a prominent role in “Every Brilliant Thing,” which was adapted from a monologue/short story Macmillan wrote called “Sleeve Notes.” The narrator’s terribly British father takes refuge from the emotional storms of his household by listening to jazz records in his office. John Coltrane, Cab Calloway, Bill Evans, Nina Simone are favorite artists, and the narrator can tell his father’s mood simply by the record he’s decided to play.
The production, directed by Jeremy Herrin and Macmillan, involves every level of the Hudson Theatre. I assumed I would be safe, occupying an aisle seat in the murderously expensive prime orchestra during a press performance attended by critics. But I wasn’t flashing a pad as my colleague across the aisle from me was doing to ward off any intrusions. And just before the show was about to start, Radcliffe was suddenly kneeling beside my seat asking if the person I was sitting with was my partner.
I told him that we weren’t a couple, just friends, and that I would be the worst person he could possibly ask to perform anything. But Radcliffe wasn’t so easily put off. “Let’s just say that you’re an older couple who have been together for some time,” he whispered. “And all you have to do is hand me this box of juice and candy bar when I refer to the older couple.”
OK, what harm could there be? Little did I know that “older couple” was to become “old couple,” a term that seemed to be repeated incessantly, at least to my Gen X ears not yet accustomed to scurrilous millennial attacks! I composed myself by pretending that we were in the world of anti-realism. But in truth, I would like to be the kind of person who would offer an anxious kid in a hospital waiting room a juice box and a candy bar, so maybe the casting wasn’t so far-fetched after all.
Daniel Radcliffe in the Broadway production of “Every Brilliant Thing.”
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(Matthew Murphy)
A theatergoer was called upon to play the vet who euthanized the narrator’s childhood pet, a dog named Indiana Bones that was symbolized by a coat someone volunteered from the audience. It was the boy’s first experience of death, a difficult concept for a young mind but an important precursor for a boy not given the luxury of existential innocence.
Other audience members, particularly those seated on the stage, played much more elaborate roles. One man, first invited to serve as a stand-in for the narrator’s father, was asked instead to play the boy. He was given one word to say in reply — “Why?” — as his father tries to explain the reason his mother is in the hospital. This same enlisted actor was later called upon to play the dad giving a toast at his son’s wedding, one of the rare occasions when he was able to summon language for the kind of deep feeling he would normally only be able to express through his records.
One kind and patient spectator conscripted to play the school counselor had to remove her shoe to improvise a sock puppet, one of the tools of her empathetic practice. Another audience member sensitively played Sam, the narrator’s love of his life, a relationship that reveals the long-term toll of being raised by a parent suffering from suicidal depression.
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Radcliffe’s audience wrangling was as intuitively sharp as his deeply felt performance. He has the comfort of a good retail politician, who’s not afraid of making direct contact with crowds. Two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy, in the house at the reviewed performance, gamely went along when Radcliffe briefly enlisted her luminous services.
Obviously, Radcliffe is the main reason “Every Brilliant Thing” is on Broadway. The show, which began at Britain’s Ludlow Fringe Festival in 2013, is a gossamer piece, a 70-minute curio best experienced in close quarters without the high expectations and ludicrous prices of New York’s turbo-charged commercial theater. The Hudson Theatre lends a mega-church vibe to the proceedings, but the spirits of theatergoers are nonetheless moved.
A scruffy-faced Radcliffe, twinkling accessible geniality in jeans and a sweatshirt, zips up and down the cavernous theater as though waging a one-man campaign against the isolation epidemic. There’s no denying that Harry Potter has matured into an assured stage actor. His Tony-winning performance in “Merrily We Roll Along” should have put to rest any doubts, but the glare of his fame can still obscure his serious chops.
Sincere yet never smarmy, ironic without ever being cynical, well-groomed though far from swank, he’s a more glamorous version of the character than the one originated by Donahoe, the British comedian with an everyman demeanor whose portrayal seemed so genuine at the Edye that I mistakenly thought that the play was his personal story.
Donahoe’s performance was filmed for HBO, but “Every Brilliant Thing” is meant to be experienced in a theater. The whole point of the show is to transform the audience into an impromptu ensemble, a group of strangers emotionally united through the story of one young man’s intimate knowledge of suicide, a subject that Albert Camus called the “one truly serious philosophical problem.”
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I’m of two minds about “Every Brilliant Thing.” I was moved once again by the piece, but I’m grateful I didn’t have to wreak havoc on my credit card to pay for my seats. I love the interactive, gentle humanity of the play, but I was also acutely aware of how the work has been commodified. I applaud Radcliffe’s willingness to carve an independent path as an actor, but I might have been more impressed by his adventurousness had he decided to perform in a pocket venue that didn’t have the tiers of pricing I associate with airlines.
Yet launching a conversation around mental health with an audience magnet as powerful as Radcliffe is on balance an excellent thing. And Radcliffe’s compassionate portrayal of a survivor recognizing that he’s not out of the woods just because he made it into adulthood is one of those things that makes a theater lover just a little more appreciative of the humanity at the center of this art form.
Kenna returns to her hometown after seven years in prison hoping to reunite with her young daughter. Along the way, she starts a sensual new romance even as she is reminded of her lost love. Reminders of Him contains about as much sexual content, coarse language and drug use as you can fit into a PG-13 flick.
